The Press Box - Remembering Sportswriter Grant Wahl, Plus the NYT Strike and Sinema Purgatorio

Episode Date: December 12, 2022

Bryan is joined by Stadio co-host Musa Okwonga to remember the life and career of sportswriter Grant Wahl (5:36). Later, David joins to dive into the announcement from Senator Krysten Sinema (I-Arizona) that she is leaving the Democratic Party (26:49), then they talk through the impact of the New York Times staff's one-day strike (36:53). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Musa Okwonga Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everyone, it's Ariel Hawani. And I'm Chuck Mindenhall. And I'm Pizzi Carroll and together we are three-pack. Join us on the brand-new Spotify Live app immediately after all of the biggest fights in combat sports. And also during the way-ins because that's when the real drama happens. So what are you waiting for? Follow the Ringwere M-M-A show right now on our exclusive Spotify podcast feed. And come join the best community in M.A.

Peace! We're out of here. David? Yeah. I was reading the New York Times. Times obituaries yesterday. And I ran across one for noted journalist Dominique LaPierre. Dominique LaPierre was the author of several wildly successful books. How wildly successful were they?

Well, per the times, LaPierre and his co-author, quote, bought adjacent homes on the French Riviera divided by a tennis court. Do they share the tennis court, I assume? I guess so. That's pretty great. What I want to know is when, not if, but when you and I strike it rich as co-authors. Yeah. What luxury accommodation will we cohabitate?

You mean like what part of the world? I mean, I don't know. You can really beat the French Riviera. I never been there. Don't even exactly know what it looks like. Couldn't again imagine it. But I mean, if you're going to just do something that bonkers, you might as well go to a place that only exists in the vague imagination.

I mean, I don't know. That might be setting our sights too high. We might be like sharing adjacent property in the Redneck Riviera somewhere, you know, hand handle region. That might be more our speed. Okay. I don't know. But what, I mean, I like the idea of the shared tennis court.

Although I can't imagine a better turnoff if you're looking to purchase a house of like from one of the two lots is for sale. Like, oh, is that tennis court on the land? It's like, well, half of it is. If you want to play, you're obligated to play your neighbor. I was imagining us both showing up in tennis whites down on the court one day and then really not knowing how to play tennis. No.

Except in the most crude and ridiculous way. No, that's what pickleball is for. You can, I think, use the same court and just sort of make up the rules. I had a vision of us having two places. in the South Pacific for some reason, whenever I think of places that I would love to live, but probably won't, the South Pacific comes up. And I just thinking of me and my family standing out on the deck

and we look out and David is paddling in his canoe across the lagoon to us. That's how we know you're coming over when our book's on the bestseller list. You and I talked about this. Remember this years ago? We were living in the same apartment in the Lower East Side, which did not include a tennis court.

And we had this vision that we would grow old and we would get, which met 40, and we would get married and we would have kids and we would live together in a giant, two-story, maybe three-story house, both of our families. This scenario might have occurred during the later seasons of the sitcom Perfect Strangers. I was going to say. But we just had this vision of like every morning, you're completely dressed and ready for work. completely dressed and ready for work. By the way, we didn't even get to that part of the vision. But in the vision, we did that and you and I just met like on the central staircase every morning.

Kind of like the end of the opening credits in Siskel and Ebert and just start talking to each other. I was going to say, I don't know how much that's like the later seasons of perfect strangers. I guess this is what you're thinking of when like they both have like significant others, but they're still living together? Was it still perfect strangers? It had it spent off into like a golden palace style new show. I'm not sure what's canon here, but I seem to remember a house and significant others and maybe kids. One of the most central parts of the opening theme song was encountering other characters from the show on the way to work. That really seems like it's built into the DNA.

It's kind of like, are you getting ready in the morning? And it's like, I'm pouring my coffee. And like, oh, there's Uncle Jesse still in his robe. And he's just like, you know, grabs the coffee out of my hand and sips it before I get a chance to drink it. So you're saying we're going to descend this staircase in this imaginary house and like Mal and Chris and Sean and everybody are going to be waving at us as we go down to work. From a car in the driveway. Just like, come on, guys. The ringer bus is leaving.

I like this. This is way better than the French Riviera. Ringer House featuring David Bryan and who knows who else. Coming up on the press box, Grant Wall, an excellent sports writer who wrote not only about what was going on. on the field but off it, died while covering the World Cup in Qatar this weekend. I'll chat with the ringers Musa O'Gwanga about

Wall's legacy inside and outside the press box. Plus, David, Democrats can't have nice things. Or at least they can't have Kirsten Cinema as a member of the party anymore. Now what? Plus, the New York Times writers walk out what changed about

the newspaper or the website we read every day? All that and more on the press box. A part of the ringer. podcast network. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to the press box. Brian Curtis of the ringer here, along with producer Erica Servantes.

Let us begin this episode by paying tribute to Grant Wall, who was a singular soccer writer and singular sports writer, full stop. Grant Wall covered the game and the world around the game for his substack, football, and for Sports Illustrated before that. While Wall was covering the World Cup in guitar, he wrote, he experienced an illness, and during the quarterfinal match between Argentina and the Netherlands,

Wall was seen by fellow reporters to slump back in his press seat. We learned Friday night that Grant Wall died a few days after celebrating his 49th birthday, and here to help us remember Wall as my ringer teammate and host of the Stadio podcast, Musa Okwonga. Musa, thanks so much for coming on the press box. Hey, thank you so much for having me. And also I've got to say co-host, otherwise my man, Ryan Hunt, is going to come after me. So yeah, we're co-conspirators.

But yeah, thank you so much for having me. And although it's such a sad day, it's a real pleasure to speak about the life and the work of the late Great Grant Grant Wall. So thank you. When did you first start reading Grant Wall's writing? Sports Illustrated, actually. A long time ago when he was writing about basketball more then.

So not just the bronze stuff, but all of it. And always such a smart, perceptive writer. And it's so funny with sports journalism because you never think you'll get to meet people. You grew up reading. That includes obviously, Obviously, we work out the ringer with Bill Simmons. Haven't spoken to him yet, but still we're part of the same orbit.

And it's pretty wild because Grant was like that. Grab was someone who grew up really admiring as a trendsetter and someone that created community wherever he went. You said the other day on CNN he was on your Mount Rushmore of sports journalists. What put his work there for you? Wow. Okay. So you look at like, you look at sport, right? The great athletes don't just succeed.

they originate and I think anyone that is on that platform is an originator and that's what he was like I think you know our colleague Conan Evans said an amazing thing about how Grant Basie essentially created a beat like without him the industry of like US soccer journalism but going bigger than that like sports journalism what he did for it and how he grew it was spectacular anyone that dies and has LeBron James and Billy Jean King tweeting about you has that's a legacy in itself. Let's do a short timeline of his career here for listeners. Wall went to Princeton and while at Princeton, according to Peter King,

he traveled to Argentina to write a senior thesis about fan culture there. There's three very Grant Wall things about that. Soccer, fan culture, and getting on a plane to go somewhere. I mean, that's just something that would distinguish his entire career. according to his former editor, Chris Stone, he wrote his first SI cover story at age 25. By age 28, he was writing about LeBron James, who was then a junior in high school. As you mentioned, LeBron paid tribute to him the other night. And then between 2009 and 2010, he starts covering soccer full-time, which you're right, create, originate.

That's the right word. That was a big, big leap to take in the United States at the time. And the wild thing is, his piece about LeBron John. James was written like a veteran. You know how you'd like, you know how'd like Theo Epstein in charge of like, you know, baseball franchises at such a young age? And you're like, hang on a minute. How is someone that young, that authoritative? And he wrote the LeBron piece as if he had been doing journalism for like 30 years. That was the, that was the remarkable thing about it. And the funny thing with Grant with his soccer stuff, it's pretty wild. You should say

that because he, he and I, you know, got to know each other just online to start with. We only actually met, we only actually hung out once ever, but we were in touch, such as the modern age, we were in touch via social media since 2012. So for 10 years. But by the time we got in touch, I felt like he'd been covering football for many years more than that. Like it's still a shock to hear it as only 2009 because his knowledge for the game, his feel for it, like his intuition was that of someone who'd been covering it for three times that,

if that makes sense. You wrote on Twitter the other day, one devastating thing about the loss of Grant Wall is that there's a very, very small number of people at any time who have the guts to keep highlighting the most grim parts of the world they love. Why is that so hard when covering soccer? Because we like to escape into our sport, don't we? It's our place of idealism. It's our happy place. And so we want to get into the stadium through the turnstiles and nothing else matters but what's happening on the pitch. But Grant's ability to step back and say, actually, these workers haven't been paid. These workers have died. And the organizers of this tournament and the

infrastructure, don't respect them and their families, that ability to hold two things, innocence and loss in the same. You know, like William Blake, I mean, songs of innocence and songs of experience. Grant had the ability, the William Blake's style ability to hold experience and innocence at the same time. It's extremely rare. It's so interesting too, because all well-intentioned sports writers start out at an event like the World Cup or the Olympics. And they say, you know what, I'm not just going to do sports. I'm going to cover everything. In this case, the moral, the human rights, the plight of migrant workers, the way Qatar got

the World Cup to begin with. I'm going to do it all. And then you and I both know what happens. You get drawn in. Yeah. They do, right? And it lures us in. And even as much as we try.

And I'm looking at his bylines, you know, his second to last byline was about how the Qatari regime didn't care about the death of yet another migrant worker. Wow. Right, yeah. Right up to the semifinals, he is still insisting. Yeah. But that's the genius of what he did. It was the geniuses. A lot of sports writers get drawn in by the tournament because they kind of think no one else is listening now, so they almost lose their nerve. With McGrath did that was so special was, because his passion for it was so evident, his knowledge was so deep, it gave me the authority to step back at any point of the tournament, even on the age of the final, leave of the final say, this is problematic.

this is a challenge for the tournament. This is a challenge for FIFA. To the point where when Grant died, you had media relations people at FIFA going, this was a great journalist. And this is, you know, Grant spent his career tearing stripes of FIFA. But at the same time, FIFA were like,

no, there are people in this organization that respect you held us to account. He actually ran for president of FIFA in 2011 against Set Blatter, which is one of the better stunts. comes from a very good place that I've ever seen as a journalist. Amazing. And this is the thing.

He had this, he had a belief in their strength of institutions, which isn't always the most fashionable thing. Because actually it makes a lot of sense sometimes to just tear the whole thing down. But the thing about Grant and his love for FIFA, I think, and it was a love for the better angels of what FIFA could be. If you look, for example, at like the whistleblower, Abdullah Ibbis, the World Cup whistleblower, Katari, who was running the world. World Cup and running the delivery of the World Cup and was like, we're not treating a workers

properly. I've got to tell the authorities about this. God tell the press. Grant and Abdullah have the same spirit. They're part of a structure which has its issues and its problems, but they're fundamentally thinking, if we just get this right, there's a new dawn for this tournament. And I think if there's any tribute or legacy for Grant, it's like we have to continue his work, have to keep sharing it, have to keep engaging with it, have to keep pushing it forward. Because I think if you truly love something, you engage with the worst aspects, if that makes sense. Does that make sense? And I think that's why he was universally admired, even by the people who he went after.

I want to ask you about this moment early in the tournament. It's the U.S. Wales match on November 21st. He comes to the stadium wearing a rainbow t-shirt in support of LGBTQ rights. He is briefly detained, told he cannot enter the state. stadium, then eventually he's allowed to enter the stadium. He would later write, the entire episode left me wondering, what's it like for ordinary Qataris who might wear a rainbow t-shirt when the world isn't watching here? What did you make of that? I thought it was incredible. A lot of people didn't like it. A lot of people felt it was like a Western imposition of different values,

but anyone that's been following the queer experience in the Arab world knows that there's been queer activism using the rainbow flag for many, many years. I thought was incredible because we learned, and only quite recently that Grant's brother is gay. That's not knowledge that I think a lot people had. So for Grant to go and do that and not make it about himself, Grant could easily have gone, oh, my brother's gay, by the way, this is about him. He never did that. Grant was like, I'm making a point.

I'm using my leverage because Grant knew full well that a lot of gay Qataris can't speak like that. The most prominent gay Qatari lives abroad because they can't be in Qatar and talk that frankly. So a lot of people might say, oh, well, like, you can't interfere with the country's politics. but actually I did not see many other options than the one that Grant made. And it's such a brilliant concept because he just wore like a rainbow t-shirt. It's such an innocuous thing. And we've seen subsequently so many other political protests have been allowed in World Cup stadiums, right? Even political slogans.

You look at like, for example, Serbia in their dressing room with like, you know, symbols about Kosovo. So Grant went in there with a rainbow flag, so innocuous. And he really kicked up a storm in the best possible way. He was a true activist in that sense. And you think that comes from authority, from being on the beat so long, coming in with this moral sense, certainly, but being on the beat so long, having such a command of the sport and of the material that you feel you can come in and do that at that moment? I don't know if it's that. I think that's who he always was, actually. I think that's the same grant that got on the plane to Argentina, actually.

It's the same grant who just switched horses mid-career and went from basketball to soccer and was like, you know what, I've done my bit to build infrastructure and basketball and community. Let me try the same for soccer. For women's soccer, for LGBT people in soccer. I think that's just who Grant always was and always would have been, frankly. Chris Whittingham, who's his podcast co-hosts and former producer noted that He wanted not just American soccer voices on his pod during the Women's World Cup,

but voices from everywhere else too. That's another through line through his work. I want to ask you about this too, Musa. Grant Wall just filed tons and tons of good copy. 30 bylines sense of arriving in Qatar. It's also one that rare sports writer who you would love to read a column from, a match report from a sort of 20-22 match report that is five takeaways from style, a profile, a podcast, television.

He really was sort of built for the modern age of sports writing, was he not? He was, and if I'm honest, though, on a slightly more grim note, his work quite kind of worried me. He worked so hard. He worked so hard. And he was, he's a 40-year-old man hammering out high-quality copy through editors, through podcast producers and not just the physical exertion.

Like that, you know, I covered a World Cup before and it was hard work and I was only working for three outlets and doing radio and doing TV. What Grant did, Grant was doing things

of an order of magnitude worse plus the physical, emotional risk, the threats he was getting, the working conditions themselves. There was a lot that Grant, this is, you know, this is emotionally the most intense

World Cup I've ever covered and I'm not even there. And Grant was basically, like at source. It's as impressive a podcast run and a journalism run as we've seen at a major tournament. The radio host Bob Stern noted this too. You have to understand this about Grant Wall that separated him from others. He was the only media member only to be at every US men's national team qualifier match home and away. He got there from his own substack base, difficult places to get to and had to be there that can't be replaced.

We've heard so many stories, Musa, about Wall's menchiness. You said on CNN the other day, everybody has a Grant Wall story. Right. What are some of your stories? Just like he had, so he sent me a DM a few years ago. I said, has someone spamming Grant? Has someone hacked you? Because he kept sending me this link to a documentary series that he was doing about

U.S. players in Germany. And he was like, I'm really fired up to get you on this podcast. I want to get you on and talk to you. interview about it. And I was like, and I just thought, because he sent it a few times, I thought it was spam. Because I was like, why is Grant, like, why does he want me to like do anything with him? Because he's like, Grant, well, like, he's big. He's big in this.

You know, I had a name as a writer, but Grant's a different level, right? Obviously. And it was like, no, I really want to interview you specifically about this. So he was like, we hung out for like half a day. And it was wonderful because we've been talking online for years. And just he gave me a platform for my work that a lot of people didn't have. that hadn't given me. There were people I've known in football a lot longer

that gave me a lot less than Grant did. And he did it out of the goodness of his own heart. And then even in the run-up to the like, you know, his death, he shared two pieces of work of mine on his platform. One was an essay for GQ about my ambivalence about this World Cup. And the next was a piece I had where basically argued the World Cup had basically failed because it had failed to distract us from the excesses and the terrible things off the field.

And Grant basically, he shared my work more than I shared his. like and not just public advice but private advice always checking in how are you doing really like that just because he he cared and never asked for anything in return it was an incredible and like i say this sorry to like go off on this but grant was not a close friend he was a good friend right and i i can say this now it sounds dramatic but okay i'll be i haven't told anyone else this apart from my co-host ryan but i basically burst into tears three times on separate occasions the day I heard the news. In the morning, when I first heard at 9 a.m.

In the afternoon, I was in a coffee shop. I went to get a coffee and was trying to like just digest it and I was gone. And then when I went to pick up some groceries that evening, I was like, go for a walk, and I was just gone again. And I was like, hang on a minute. I met this guy. I hung out with him once. I was in touch him online for like 10 years, but not, you know,

I kind of imagine how his close friends and family are feeling. because I was devastated. That's who he was. He was a mensch. When you talk about building a community of writers and also elevating the craft, we should

underline how rare that is among sports writers. Brian, you know, people go for number one. People are like, I want to be on the red carpet. I want to be next to Billie Jean King and the winner's enclosure. I want to like have LeBron on WhatsApp. there are sports writers that basically are like in order to succeed i have to ensure that many others

fail and those people actually prosper they go very far here's the thing when they pass away they will not have eulogies like we're giving grant and grant this is the thing grant went the long way round he he helped everyone and still ascended to that level that's what makes them one of the greats a couple more stories from that chris winningham talked about how we all called 16 editors to try to get jobs for Sports Illustrated colleagues after they had gotten laid off. Pablo Iglesias Maurer of the Athletic says in 2013, the Federation refused to credential me for the Open Cup final. Grant barely knew me,

yet he made one phone call and got me in. A year later, he pushed to get my outlet a World Cup credential. I may not exist in this business without Grant's tutelage and help. Pretty amazing stuff. It's incredible. Yeah. Just comment, too, on his fame.

His SI colleague, Jack McCallum, had a very funny story here. It says, first time I realized the power of Twitter or the power of Grant Wall, more specifically, was at the London Olympics in 2012. Three of us met at a pub. A football enthusiast slash Grant Wall fan sent out a tweet that Grant was out the pub. This is in London. And suddenly out of nowhere came a slew of people wanting to talk soccer with Grant. I guess there's no Hoops fan here, I joked.

We are with Wall people. people and we are nobody's, said Alex Wolfe, the other sports writer who was there. A sports writer, that's wild, isn't it? That's what you get for an athlete normally. It didn't hurt, Grant. He did actually kind of, he did look a bit like, like a head, like a chief soccer administrator. Like he looked like, he did have big soccer administrator energy. But yeah, like that's a sports writer. Where else do you get a crowd? Send a tweet out. Like, at one person, might be a relative.

If that was me, yeah, yeah. I know what his reputation was like here in the US among soccer fans and among sports fans. What was his literary reputation like in the UK? Just an unbelievable writer. It's weird to talk about the UK and the US. That's the one thing I would say. The one people talk about what he did for US soccer journalism.

Like, no, Grant was big. Like, he was respected globally. Like, it's not just even US UK. Like, we're in Germany. We say how he's regarded here by people. just universal respect, universal respect by someone that did the work, harder than any, you know, as hard as any staff, as hard as any freelancer, half his age, like the schedule he had.

I said to a friend, the man had a workload of someone that would have been taxing for someone half his age. And he had the best post-game in journalism. He always asked the hard questions. He always posted up against the toughest opponents. And more often than not, came out on top with credit. You mentioned the run of writing and podcasting he's had during this World Cup. How do you think this will function as a coda for his career?

I just think the quality, the level, the range of what he did, it was the full range of his gifts, even just looking at his Twitter timeline. There was an amazing moment where he got a journalism award, I think, a FIFA journalism award from presented by the Brazilian Ronaldo. And I thought, well, that's just fitting. You were in your own way as great in your craft as he was in his. Like you brought something really new to the table. And it's a horrifying situation that we're discussing this, that he's bowed out in this fashion.

It's horrifying. And he stayed true to the very end. This man never, ever ducked to the issues. And it can't be a greater legacy than that. Musa Okwonga. Thanks so much for coming on the press box. My pleasure. Thank you.

All right, David, coming up in 30 seconds, the Democrats lose a senator. Call it cinema purgatorio. Plus, what did it look like when New York Times writers walked out on strike? But first, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week, where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. This week's runner-up comes after Herschel Walker's loss and last Tuesday Senate runoff in Georgia.

It was an overwork Twitter joke to write Lindsay Graham has called Raphael Warnock to concede. Pretty good. But this week's winner comes from valued listener, Andrew Johnson. It's from the World Cup. Saturday morning, it was on. England versus France. You could have a David or Brian level of soccer knowledge

and you were still in. Absolutely in. Big moment late in the match when Harry Kane, the English captain, missed a penalty kick that would have tied the match. France won.

It was a very overwork. Twitter joke to write, Kane Unable. Kane unable. Harry Kane is just a bounty, a potential punons. I'm sure,

I'm sure most of them have been used. We should just have a Christmas, 12 days of Christmas of just Harry Kane puns, pun headlines over the years. You think if he'd made the goal, we would have gotten through Hellfire and Brimstone. It's Harry Kane. I was thinking rolling lines with like the Kane Mutiny, you know. That's coming. All right. Right.

Maybe the fire the manager. Exactly. Kane Mutiny. A lot of places to go here. Raising Kane, if he comes back in four years and wins a tournament. If English misery sends you back to old books, very old books, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week.

All right, David, in the notebook dump. Remember last week when things were going really well for the Democrats? Oh, yeah. Remember that? Yeah. Not so much anymore. On Thursday, Arizona Senator Kirsten Cinema, who has tormented the Democrats from inside the party,

told Chuck Schumer she's going to be outside the party. She's becoming an independent. She's going to keep her committee assignments, which makes her kind of sort of aligned with the Democrats. Her issue positions, which we've talked about on here, are very interesting, shall we say?

Jonathan Chait described it as cosmopolitan progressive social issue profile joined with a far-right economic agenda, the appeal of which is confined to an extremely rarefied circle of affluent to libertarians. What do you make of Kirsten Cinema exiting the Democrats?

Well, so politically and ideologically, I mean, I don't think anybody's particularly surprised, right? I mean, it's not like she was a neat fit for the party and always sort of cast herself as an outsider even when she was in it. Um, if anything, this surprise is sort of the timing. I don't think that that's so surprising. I mean, I think this was, it all seemed fairly well staged.

And frankly, um, you know, it's a good thing Warnock won, you know, for the Democrats or whatever. But I'm sure that she, I'm sure, my guess is she was probably hoping for the other outcome, you know, she'd get real, real center stage for a while. Not that it would have like necessarily shifted everything at time, but I think the spotlight would have been on her a little more heavily had he lost. I mean, it's, she was, there's a lot of political, um, maneuvering inherent in this, right? I mean, she was worried about losing the nomination. She didn't think she was going to be the nominee for, you know, in, in Arizona moving forward. Um, now she's potentially going to be a spoiler that, again, potentially hands votes to the Republican, but I guess it could cut either way.

and yeah, I mean, it's just a bunch of maneuvering and sort of grandstanding. I mean, it seems like deep diving trying to wrap your head around her politics. And I know that wasn't Chait's really point, I mean, the entire point, but that's sort of, it seems sort of beside the point, right? I mean, she just seems sort of, I don't know. she just seems like the politics are completely secondary to just the weird contrarian pose

and she doesn't actually like you if you watched any of her exit interviews or whatever any of the press that she did there was no substance to it there was no like there was no like there's no policy backing up any of her move

it was just this sort of like weird winking at towards centrism in the abstract and not but centrism is absolutely meaningless outside of like concrete context right i mean it's you what what are you triangulating against you know if you're not if i mean if it's centrism on its own is well i mean it's a good talking point but it's utterly meaningless right and we've seen over and over again that it works um you know we're looking at you joe mansion you know

it works over and over again in terms of like positioning yourself in the media but it's It's just, but there's no there, so I don't really know what the point is. Politics secondary to weird contrarian pose. Where have we seen that in American life recently? Mm-hmm. But the Democrats are in a weird position here. Now, they can certainly win, a Democrat could win that seat, but, you know, as hard as it is, I mean, the Democrats are really beholden to the weird centrist contrarians in their ranks

because they're not going to elect another Democrat in West Virginia. You know, they're not, it's, there's a, there's a, as much as the tide seems to be moving, you know, as much as, as much as these purple states seem to be turning blue sometimes, I mean, substantive continuous control of the Senate and Congress is not a realistic future, you know. I mean, I think the Congress might be more realistic than the Senate in over the next eight years. So West Virginia is kind of its own deal, right? Arizona's interesting in this case, because the Democrat, have somehow won three straight

Senate elections in Arizona. Mark Kelly twice, Kirsten Cinema once. But if you look at the polls and civics did a poll of Arizona fairly recently, which I think was about the Kelly Blake Masters race,

here was cinema's approval or excuse me favorable rating among Democrats. 7%. She has a seven I'm not leaving off a digit, 7% approval rating among or favorable ratings,

excuse me, among Democrats. Mark Kelly, the other Democratic senator from Arizona just got reelected, has a 4% favorable rating among Republicans. Wow. So the number of Republicans

who think well of Mark Kelly is about the same as the number of Democrats who think well of Kirsten Center. That's pretty amazing. Now, she obviously looked at that. and she sees potential primary challenges from Congressman Ruben Gallego, maybe even more former Phoenix mayor Greg Stanton, who has Cinema's old house seed. And she says, there's no way I'm going to win a Democratic primary in two years.

Yeah. Zero chance. Seven percent favorable rate. So my move is leave the party, go independent, and, you know, go independent, and, you know, And I don't know. Are you looking at me for the answer? And, well, I mean, and hopefully get enough, you know, get good enough numbers to, to, I mean, you can be more than a spoiler, I guess. I mean, it's, you know, in an election that divided.

I mean, you have to get 35% of the vote or something? That the, the, I mean, it all seems to be about expediency, though, right? I mean, it's just all about making the, doing what's best for her. So, I mean, I don't think, I don't think anything's out of the question. I don't think any party alike. I don't think she could be a Republican. She could be a Republican. Mitch McConnell wants her to become a Republican.

So that could definitely happen. And so you could wind up seeing a strange race where you have Ruben Gallego versus Kirsten Sinema, not in the Democratic primary, but in the general election, I guess. Or she just for now says, I'm an independent. I intend to run for reelection. And then the Democratic calculation is, what do we do? Do we send someone in there to win the nomination, potentially just chew up our own vote two ways,

and then elect Republican? And by the way, I saw this nightmare scenario thrown out there. What if the Republican nominee is Carrie Lake? Well, what do we do? Now, there's probably also a scenario where the Democrats put Gallego in, in and Kirsten Cinema makes the calculation and say, my future is just nothing if all I do is sit in here and cost the Democrats

the seat. There's just, there's no upside for me at all. Yeah. So then my move is to not run, maybe even endorse the Democrats or not endorse at all and go off and do whatever quote unquote centrist do after they retire. I don't know. No labels. Think tanks? I don't know. But it's an interesting game. I think Jake calls it a game of chicken.

Axios calls it the threat of mutually assured destruction. And I guess we just see what happens now. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, listen, there's a long, there's a big gap between a game of chicken and mutually assured destruction, right? I mean, there's the latter, but both of them take a certain sort of volition on the part of the chicken ear. but it's a

I think it's really hard to to look into a crystal ball and guess what she wants out of this so that's what's that's what makes it most perplexing is we don't really fully understand the motivation you know if it's all about

ego and I'm not saying it is but if we're all about ego that would at least be like the help you chart a path forward but we don't know we don't know what's going on here Ruben Gallego in a text message obtained by Axios said he was quote thinking of running for

Senate, which in politics usually means you're running. I already bought the suits. New York Times also had a funny line. One person involved in shaping the White House approach to working with cinema, who spoke on condition of anonymity, characterized her as difficult

and contrarian. I like asking for anonymity to characterize her as something she is trying to be on purpose out loud. Also enjoyed, she wrote a op-ed for the Arizona Republic to announce her move. And the op-ed was titled, Why I'm Registering as an Independent, which really felt like

either an athletic essay or an essay about somebody moving from New York to Los Angeles. I don't know why that title made me laugh so much. In other news, David, I want to direct you to a very interesting. story that ran in the New York Times on December 7. It's interesting because it had no byline. Just said New York Times staff. Story read like this. Reporters and editors at the New York Times began a one-day strike on Thursday,

saying talks between their union and the company had dragged on and showed limited progress. The contract between the Times and the New York Times Guild expired in March 2021 at about 40 bargaining sessions have been held since. Negotiators have failed to come to an agreement on salaries, health and retirement benefits and other issues. More than 1,100 employees signed a pledge to strike for 24 hours. It's fascinating. Claire Malone and the New Yorker notes that this was the first New York Times, at least the longest New York Times work stoppage since 1978. Wow. So it has been quite a long time. You saw reporters from the Times going on Twitter and saying, this is Maggie Astor.

We're asking readers to stand with us on the digital picket line and not visit any New York Times platforms tomorrow. Read local news. Make something from a cookbook. Break your wordle streak. And that tweet's so interesting, right? Because it's not just don't read news from the New York Times. It's an acknowledgement that the New York Times is this big, sprawling company now. Yeah.

She could have added, you know, don't read a gamer from Lakers, whoever they were playing. Well, yeah. And it shows how well the paper of record has sort of found ways to insinuate, re-insinuate itself into your life in a post-paper world, right? I mean, there's always competition on the New York City newsstands, but if you were in New York Times, if you know, if you were a Times reader and most, you know, many people in New York are, it's just sort of inconceivable to go about your day without holding it in your hand. I'm speaking of times in the past, but even for a lot of people today.

And the same way, it's like you don't even know the degree to which you're dependent. And I use that term sort of loosely on the times, you know? I mean, like, wordal dependent. Yeah. And how many times do you, I mean, you find yourself in the new, I mean, I go my, I generally type the letters in Y into my search bar a couple of times a day, you know? I mean, just like without even, don't even, no need. for a bookmark. I put an end and it knows where I want to go, you know, just to make sure there's no headlines. I'm big stories I'm missing. They're one of the, they're one of the few sort

of indispensable companies like that. And so, yeah, they're everywhere. I'm with you. Reading the athletic this morning, there was not one moment when I thought I am reading a New York Times product. Now it was about 545 in the morning when I'm opening links. But when I'm sitting there reading the G. O. Raina story, the athletic had this morning. I was not like, oh, New York Times, right. They have found ways into our lives that are not obvious, even for two people that are hosting media podcast, or at least it's not at the top of your mind. Claire Malone in the New Yorker piece I mentioned says this, the major sticking point between the Times Guild, which compromises not just journalists, but other workers, such as security guards and IT staff, and management is wages. Under management's

proposal, most of us would make far less money in inflation-adjusted terms in 2023 than we did in 2020, a Guild representative wrote to members. And this is amidst two things. One, Times profits being up. And two, what you and I were just talking about, that the Times is this big, giant media company that is adding pieces. And yet, as a reporter at the New York Times, or a security guard or IT pro at the New York Times, just say, wait a second, you keep talking about this. We keep reading these triumphant press releases about

operating profits or adding something gigantic thing like the athletic. Yeah. And we don't see the money coming to us. Yeah. So over 1,100 employees went on strike for a day. And that was another really interesting part of this, David, is what does the New York Times look like

when 1,100 employees are not working there. I got the physical paper on Friday. It was fascinating to look at it because it's a combination of a couple of things. One is a lot of their overseas correspondents are not in the guild. So are not part of this strike. There were stories that were written before the strike that were placed in the physical paper on Friday. day that was like, okay, you know, this was written before, but whoop, here you go. And there's a very interesting Twitter thread that Nick Confessori put together where he

kept track of all the Times writers who were saying, hey, by the way, this story was just tweeted out with my byline on it. A news alert just went out with my byline. That was written before. Yeah. I want everybody to know that I stand with the guild here. Mark Metzetti, Katie Edmondson, Annie Carney, David McKay. on and on.

Just so you know, you may be seeing my story right now. You may have just read a tweet with my name in it. But that was written before. We heard that editors would do some of the work on the paper. Again, this is just all fascinating, right? How do you put this together? Then there was this report in semaphore from Max Taney. Chief White House reporter Peter Baker and White House correspondent Michael Shear

told colleagues before the walkout, they would not be participating in the one-day work stoppage, three people told Sem before. So here are two big-day reporters. And when you look at the Friday paper, there on the left side is the Brittany Griner story, which was probably the biggest news item, or at least most immediate news item that came out on Thursday.

Story by Michael D. Shear and Peter Baker. And I also noted when I got the Times email, the big daily email, it was written by Peter Baker. Oh, wow. And that's kind of interesting, right? Because if we think it's like, what is the part of the New York Times

that must function, even if 1100 employees are on strike in management? Is the answer to the newsletter? Is it not? I mean, is in that somewhere on the metal stand? I mean, you have to have a front page of the paper.

It's kind of wild to think about. But think about it. Like if you can, if you're playing around with the homepage and you don't have all your excellent reporters and journalists, we can go some wire copy there, right? Mm-hmm. You can have an editor fill in some stuff? You're talking about like the physical paper or the or the, the home page mainly? The homepage. Yeah, I mean, the homepage could be 90% existing pieces.

I mean, nobody would really, you know, I don't think you would, I don't think you would, if you didn't know there was a strike, you wouldn't think something was a miss. if you just happen to see like a, you know, Times Magazine profile and the kind of above the fold on the home page that you already, that you would already read. Yeah. And you can just, I feel that you can just kind of move things around a little bit. And again, as long as it has the big news, the big news there. Yeah. And again, some of that can be wire copy. And sometimes it is when something really big happens.

And the Times reporters sort of fill in beyond that. But the morning email is something that's sort of got to happen, you know. And somebody's got to do it. And that was apparently the answer in this case. What do you think the reaction would have been if the New York Times had just employed like AIs to write a lot of the stuff? I don't know if I want to speculate because what I'm scared always with AI is that like everybody's going to be like, oh, it's fine.

You know, it's not what I wanted. Now, I don't know if AIs will ever be able to really replace good national news reporting. I mean, obviously someone has to go get the information. a lot of stuff on the opinion on the editorial page that could probably pretty easily be drafted up by AI and thrown into the newspaper. So we can't replace the work of good, diligent globe-trotting reporting. But in terms of just like a hat and your op-ed-ed-ed-ed-off. I think you can just type that much into an engine and watch it go. What does politics owe to pro wrestling?

Oh, yeah. Well, you might get in trouble for plagiarism if the AI-jury. just starts grabbing paragraphs from all the hundreds of pieces that have already contemplated that. There was some interesting article in the Washington Post that was talking about wordal players who had broken their streak to stand with Times employees. Wardle player Chuck Smith from Toronto told the Washington Post he broke a 338-day streak. I feel pretty okay about it.

He wrote a Twitter DM. My streak was a, quote, rather pointless point of pride for me with family. and friends. I share results with every morning, but I'm happy in solidarity with the striking workers.

338 days of Whartle. Down the train. Well, I don't think he regrets it for one minute, do you? No, no,

of course not. I just thought that was really interesting. All right, it's time for a game. No one ever misses. It's time for David Shoemaker guesses the strained pun headline.

Yeah. What's my streak? Like, one? I don't think you got the last one. Okay, so zero. That's good. We can only go up from here.

This was the one about NFL long snappers that turned out to be fourth in niches. Oh, my God. Nobody got that. I loved it, but no, no one's ever going to get that. Today's headline comes from Mitch Goldidge, writer-editor over at Sports Illustrated, nominates his own magazine because there is an article, David, about the resurgent Detroit Lions. How about those Detroit Lions?

Beat the Vikings on Sunday. Yeah. They are suddenly in playoff contention. Mm-hmm. Phrase we are not used to associating with the Detroit Lions ever. And one of the more surprising parts of this is that their quarterback, Rams cast off Jared Goff, is playing really, really well. So I want you to think about the appreciation, the love that is coming to Jared Goff from inside Ford Field.

What was Sports Illustrated's strained pun headline? Hats goff to you? Golf. Fans show their appreciation inside a stadium. A round of applause. Cheer. Ovation. Is it, are looking for a synonym for like cheer for like a...

Yeah, for applause, perhaps. For rooting. Reading. No, applause. Just keep this simple. Clapping. Uh-huh. So, and it's Jared Goff, so it's...

Um, clap. Wait, and it's Jared Goff, so it's... Goff. Yes, so it's... Yeah. Maybe something we use often. Oh, clap on, clap golf? No, wait, clap.

No, it's golf claps. Oh, golf claps. That's actually really good. Golf claps, which feels like the right amount of clapping for Jared Goff. Polite, restrained. Not lusty applause. No. Golf claps.

He is David Chewaker. I'm Brian Curtis, production magic by Erica Servantes. I'm back later this week. Next Monday, December 19th, David, we need to do our annual year in media show. This is a little different. We don't have a conventional top 10 list. We don't have to worry about ranking nope, but we are going to give you our highs and lows of the year in media. Plus, of course, more lukewarm takes about the media.

See you then, David. See you later, Brian.